People used to think of Amazon as a place for online shop-
ping, and it certainly still lls that role. But the company
has emerged as a leading cloud provider for businesses
big and small, and it is fast becoming a major player in the
federal IT space as well. That last evolution is due in large
part to the leadership of Teresa Carlson, vice president
of the worldwide public sector at Amazon Web Services.
Under Carlson s guidance, AWS GovCloud effort con-
tinued to expand in 2012, allowing a growing number of
agencies and customers to move workloads to the cloud
while meeting federal security and compliance requirements.
AWS also delivered 149 new services, features and appli-
cations to its more than 150 government customers and
1,500 educational institutions, responding rapidly to agency
leaders and ultimately helping agencies be more ef cient
with their spending.
Those numbers will likely continue to grow because the
General Services Administration s Infrastructure as a Serv-
ice blanket purchase agreement allows agencies to easily
buy AWS offerings.
"2012 was an awesome year for federal IT. You see the
government making drastic changes in how it is utilizing and
re-envisioning federal IT from a mission-driven perspective,"
said Carlson, who left Microsoft for AWS in December 2010.
In 2012, NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used AWS to
stream images and video from the Mars Curiosity rover to
millions watching back home. AWS also transformed 200
terabytes of gene sequencing data into a publicly available
dataset through the 1000 Genomes Project with the National
Institutes of Health. And AWS entrenched the Obama for
America Campaign and the Presidential Inauguration Com-
mittee rmly in the cloud.
Although the bulk of Carlson s contributions to the federal
IT community came via AWS and making cloud services
more mainstream, she also helped drive the TechAmerica
Foundation s Big Data Commission, which released a report
on big data and federal agencies in late 2012.
"She lined up Amazon s resources and worked across
several companies to deliver data that highlighted the big
promise of big data," said Dan Chenok, executive director
of the IBM Center for the Business of Government and a
Federal 100 awards judge.
Carlson co-led the writing of the report, which provided
use cases of big data in action to government agencies still
grappling with what big data is and what to do with it. The
government is the largest producer of data in the world,
she said, and while helping agencies cash in on potentially
hidden treasures within billions of lines of code is good
for business at AWS, it is also good for taxpaying citizens.
"The thing about big data is that tools like this can affect
the government in a massive way," Carlson said.
And while "big data" remains a vague buzzword to some
agencies, Carlson noted that just a few years ago, the term
"cloud" generated similar confusion. Now it s widely rec-
ognized as an ef cient way to do business.
With private-sector support, continued collaboration
and new partnerships in the public sector, Carlson said
big data might be another way to "transform the govern-
ment through more ef cient practices that help move the
government forward." ■
Teresa
Carlson
Changing the game for cloud services
2013 EAGLE WINNER
BY FRANK KONKEL
March 30, 2013 FCW.COM
13
ZAID HAMID